Last week was our third week at AcceleratorHK and the teams are starting to really get the hang of Customer Development, specifically Customer Discovery interviews. A lot of the teams have taken the feedback that they got on their customer discovery interviews and started to build MVPs and prototypes to do the next round of customer discovery (and some are thinking about moving to Customer Validation soon.) Even though it is early, it is exciting to see the early stage prototypes. (I can’t help the application developer inside of me.)

One team treated some of their interviewees to a Hong Kong Hot Pot dinner. What better way to get a captive audience?

We also focused on presentation skills at our Friday meeting. We had some founders give presentations about themselves and some do a Petcha-kucha.

Lastly, we finally got our program director, Paul to loosen up and started a brand new Accelerator HK tradition, Friday Hoodie Day.

This week is a big week with mentors coming in, demos, and more customer discovery/validation. Stay tuned.

Last week was our second week at AcceleratorHK and things are starting to fall into a good cadence. On Monday, we had our first of the weekly 1:1 meetings and Paul and I worked directly with the teams on the issues that they face. We also had two amazing mentors come in:

First was Salim Virani, the creator of Leancamp. He talked to us about Customer Development and took a lot of time out of his vacation time in HK to spend with the teams on how to ask the right Customer Discovery and Customer Validation questions.

Later in the week we had Mikaal Abdulla, co-founder of 8 Securities, a Hong Kong startup success story, come in and tell us the story of leaving a well paying secure job and going out and starting a new business in Hong Kong, along with the war stories of raising money and some secrets to their brilliant marketing campaigns.

On Friday we did our first Friday all-hands meeting and was able to have an update by each team on their progress, practice their elevator pitch (next week I am going to put some of them in an actual elevator to practice), and ask the cohort for any help. We also gave out some Telerik tee-shirts. We have a strict attendance policy, so one member had to phone in via Skype who was home sick. (Notice we gave him his tee-shirt anyway.)

On Friday night we went out for some beers after a long week at the Accelerator doing Customer Development. The teams are still focusing on Customer Discovery and Customer Validation and will be in Week 3 as well. Stay tuned…

I am happy to be part of the organizing committee for the Agile Tour in Hong Kong on December 1st. I also convinced Telerik to send me 30kg of Tee-shirts for attendees of the event. Details are below, register today, space is limited (only about 30 seats left)!

Agile Tour is finally coming to Hong Kong! We organize a full day with international and local expert speakers on a variety of Agile topics:

Title : How to suck less with distributed teamsSpeaker : Emerson MillsAbstract:

We all know that distributed teams suck. ( Don't we? ) They perform much worse than co-located teams. Unfortunately for places just starting to move to Agile methodologies, it's often a impediment that has to be worked around or removed. In this session we'll discuss some of the illusions about distributed team productivity and how to get around some of the problems before you can move to co-located teams.

Why did we even use them?!

Distribute teams not people

Giving teams ownership of features and not tasks

Sharing a product development culture

Title: Inject start up spiritSpeaker: Wang XiaoMingAbstract:

During the past a couple of years I heard many complains from CEOs and senior management that there was unavoidable bureaucracy and large company problems which were their big pain. Many teams suffered unclear project goals, small team but many management layers, ineffective meeting, tons of reports and unstable products. Those problems caused project failure or delay. In this presentation I will lead you to experience a real project in a large company who saved themselves from failure and transferred to a team with start up spirit and doubled their velocity in 4 months.

A real project, double velocity

The pain of founders

Inject start up spirit

Lightweight Agile.

Title: Test Driven DevelopmentSpeaker: Ian LucasAbstract:

In this session we will explore Test Driven Development (TDD) utilizing XQuery, the XML Query Language. TDD helps facilitate higher quality software solutions, and the modular nature of XQuery lends itself well to the practice.

Among the biggest reasons for the reluctance of organizations in adopting Agile is their belief in the effectiveness of traditional models in estimation and planning. The fear of losing their perceived predictability through their conventional techniques. Agile erases these all and leaves you with a chaotic view of what is to come. But is that truly the case?

We will first explore the assumptions behind traditional estimation and planning techniquesWe will then counter that with the assumptions behind Agile estimation and planningWe will show the different features of traditional estimation and planningWe will then show the different features of Agile estimation and planningWe then compare what we actually lose and what we gain when we move toward Agile estimation and planning

Title: Introduction to DevOps (topic to be confirmed)Speaker: TBDAbstract:

DevOps is a response to the growing awareness that there is a disconnect between what is traditionally considered development activity and what is traditionally considered operations activity. This disconnect often manifests itself as conflict and inefficiency.

You will have a chance to meet and talk to international and local Agile experts!

This past weekend was the 3rd Startup Weekend in Hong Kong and I was lucky enough to return again as a judge. This year it was huge with 14 teams competing!

As usual, I was very impressed by the ideas, hard work, and execution. They stared on Friday night with lots of pitches and team formation. The group worked all day Saturday and Sunday at the CoCoon co-working space in Hong Kong (the same co-work space AcceleratorHK is using). A few AcceleratorHK cohort members as well as program director Paul Orlando were helping out as mentors.

On Sunday night we all gathered to a different venue where we heard all of the 14 pitches. Myself and four other esteemed judges listened to the 5 minute presentations and lead the 3 minute Q&A session.

The teams came from all walks of life as well as had ideas and teams that were in a variety of domains including: social, conference networking, kitchen rental, shopping, car sharing, film location scouting, and creative ways to use your free time. After the deliberation, which was close, we choose “FilmScout” as the winner. FilmScout was a team that built a solution for filmmakers and film students to find film locations to shoot in. While a niche market, they were a 100% solution to a market segment and demonstrated that they followed the Customer Development process over the course of the competition (which accounts for 1/3 of the judging criteria).

After the event there was some networking and I was interviewed on local Hong Kong TV about the startup scene in Hong Kong, AcceleratorHK, and of course my role as a judge in Startup Weekend.

Last week was the first week of the AcceleratorHK program. We have six teams that make up this cohort coming from: Hong Kong, Silicon Valley, Mexico, and Malaysia. The teams are just starting out but are in the following domains: social, location based, and community.

We started out with an introduction to Customer Development by program director Paul Orlando and then broke up the teams and gave them a Startup Weekend style assignment : go out and work on project for 48 hours with new teammates with a focus on Customer Development. The results were…interesting.

We had two mentors come in and work with the teams. John Bristowe came in from Australia and spoke about HTML5 and Phonegap (since we are a mobile accelerator) and then provided technical training on KendoUI and Icenium.

Shanghai based, Spanish investor Oscar Ramos also came in and did a great mentoring talk on Visual Thinking and how to use it as a tool in your customer development process.

We even had time to hit the racetrack at Happy Valley on Wednesday night for Oktoberfest night for a cohort social.

On Friday we had our first check-in to see how the teams were doing and each team did their elevator pitch. (One team included their winnings at Happy Valley as their first revenue. )